Abstract

LOPERA MEDINA, Sergio. THE USE OF THE COLLOQUIAL LANGUAGE IN THE COMPLIMENTS IN A UNIVERSITY POPULATION. Linguist.lit. [online]. 2014, n.66, pp.89-103. ISSN 0120-5587.

This article describes the use of colloquial language in compliments in a university population in Medellín, Colombia. As a research instrument, a discourse completion test (DCT) was administered to 740 participants. The DCTs were analyzed using Cratilo software program and not only the morpho-syntactic level and the lexical-semantic level (Briz, 1996) were taken into account in order to describe the colloquial language, but also the following variables: sex, age, socioeconomic status, and relationship with the university. Results support that Medellinenses use exclamatory sentences introduced by qué, and an interjection (oh, uh, eh, uy, ay) usually accompanies them in order to intensify the force of the compliment. Also, that students, males, people from socioeconomic status level 1 and 2, and people of ages from 18 to 30 tend to use more colloquial language.

Keywords : colloquial language; compliments; DCTs.

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